Building an annotated damage image database is the first step to support AI-assisted hurricane impact analysis. Up to now, annotated datasets for model training are insufficient at a local level despite abundant raw data that have been collected for decades. This paper provides a systematic approach for establishing an annotated hurricane-damaged building image database to support AI-assisted damage assessment and analysis. Optimal rectilinear images were generated from panoramic images collected from Hurricane Harvey, Texas 2017. Then, deep learning models, including Amazon Web Service (AWS) Rekognition and Mask R-CNN (Region Based Convolutional Neural Networks), were retrained on the data to develop a pipeline for building detection and structural component extraction. A web-based dashboard was developed for building data management and processed image visualization along with detected structural components and their damage ratings. The proposed AI-assisted labeling tool and trained models can intelligently and rapidly assist potential users such as hazard researchers, practitioners, and government agencies on natural disaster damage management. 
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                            Zero-shot Building Attribute Extraction from Large-Scale Vision and Language Models.
                        
                    
    
            Existing building recognition methods, exemplified by BRAILS, utilize supervised learning to extract information from satellite and street-view images for classification and segmentation. However, each task module requires human-annotated data, hindering the scalability and robustness to regional variations and annotation imbalances. In response, we propose a new zero-shot workflow for building attribute extraction that utilizes large-scale vision and language models to mitigate reliance on external annotations. The proposed workflow contains two key components: image-level captioning and segment-level captioning for the building images based on the vocabularies pertinent to structural and civil engineering. These two components generate descriptive captions by computing feature representations of the image and the vocabularies, and facilitating a semantic match between the visual and textual representations. Consequently, our framework offers a promising avenue to enhance AI-driven captioning for building attribute extraction in the structural and civil engineering domains, ultimately reducing reliance on human annotations while bolstering performance and adaptability. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 2131111
- PAR ID:
- 10502343
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 8647-8656
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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